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Back in November 2011, I wrote an article entitled "The Machine That Changes Everything." The topic was the purported invention of an eccentric Italian by the name of Andrea Rossi. He claims to have invented a machine that can generate enough clean energy to change the world. (Read the original article for background)

So for the last 25 years, very few scientists even looked at the possibility of LENR (aka Cold Fusion), but a handful did. And something strange happened. Some of them reported that, using nickel and hydrogen at room temperatures, they could produce more energy than they put into the system. Lots more. Too much to be explained by a chemical reaction. But none of them could or can explain why. So many other scientists, being of open mind but closed ears, respond, “If you can’t explain it, it isn’t happening.”

But that is not what engineer Andrea Rossi (and his partner physicist Sergio Focardi) said. He said (and this is my interpretation of his actions), “Let someone else figure out why. If it works, I am gonna build it and sell them. Lots of them.” And that is what he has done. He built it and he has demonstrated it.

Scientists yell, “Impossible!” Rossi responds, “I don’t care.”

What Rossi claims to have built is a machine that reproduces those unexplained experiments on a large scale. A machine that can produce lots of energy cleanly and very cheaply. If he is right, it is the machine that changes everything.

Well since then, the skepticism towards Rossi has grown, primarily due to the fact that while he continued to announce advances in the technology, his promises of independent 3rd party testing of the machine had yet to become a reality. Over the last 6 months even the news from Rossi himself has become a mere trickle while we waited and waited on the independent testing. Even many supporters of Rossi had given up.

And now this.

In paper by well respected scientists at Cornell University arXiv.org, these scientists have said and I am paraphrasing, not only is this thing real, it is amazing.

Forbes magazine writer Mark Gibbs puts it this way

The paper was authored by Giuseppe Levi of Bologna University, Bologna, Italy; Evelyn Foschi, Bologna, Italy; Torbjörn Hartman, Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson and Lars Tegnér of Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; and Hanno Essén, of the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. While some of these people have previously been public in their support of Rossi and the E-Cat they are all serious academics with reputations to loose and the paper is detailed and thorough.
...
And now, the big reveal … the authors’ conclusions are (again, the emphasis is mine):

… if we consider the whole volume of the reactor core and the most conservative figures on energy production, we still get a value of (7.93 ± 0.8) 102 MJ/Liter that is one order of magnitude higher than any conventional source.

To put that in perspective, the following graph plots the peak power of various energy sources against their specific energy (energy per unit mass). As you can see, gasoline is way out in front in terms of how much energy is available and how much power can be delivered but if this paper is correct, you can make that “gasoline was way out in front” because, as can be seen, the E-Cat has roughly four orders of magnitude more specific energy and three orders of magnitude greater peak power than gasoline!

I don't pretend to know the ins and out of testing, but these are real scientists with a real paper on a respected real journal. Of course, this is just the beginning of the story, but this is definitely something to keep an eye on.

So that is the good news. I stand by the bad news part of all this from my original article.

Unlimited cheap energy would save the world, right? Well, yes. Right after it almost destroys it. If this thing is verified and becomes that machine that changed the world or even if it is a fraud, someday, somewhere, somebody will build the machine that changed the world, and the one thing you can count on is war.

As you know, there is a whole part of the world whose entire existence is funded by oil money. Their whole existence, they have nothing, NOTHING else. If that oil becomes severely devalued overnight their leaders will need to attack other people lest their people attack them. Like I said, the machine that changes everything.

Nan may. Think of it this way. What would America become if suddenly small countries gained new tech that relagated America's military and economic might into obsolescence? It'd become much much poorer and diplomatically irrelevant and very very desperate. Likely resulting in a war. And thats a stable western nation.

Water is more basic than oil. Widely available cheap energy will bring de-salination that removes a potent source of conflict in many places.

Dear "Servent of the Cheif", America's military and economic prowess are culturally and institutionally rooted. A country that has cheap energy but no justicial system to protect private property, no culture of hard work, and no culture of providing for the future will not even be an also-ran; it won't even get out of the gate.

Louis, unless I am mistaken but most of the American blogs I read are currently lamenting the loss of all three aspects of culture you are implying is America's bedrock. Secondly, I didn't imply the smaller countries, wouldn't have a judicial system that can make it stable and prosperous, indeed my implication was that it would have and this would be to America's detriment.

I've been following the Rossi story for a number of years. It's not all that it's cracked up to be. I don't know one way or the other but he's been saying the same thing for years while NEVER allowing it to be fully tested. Even now the saga continues. Don't hold your breath.

Intriguing, but I'd sound a note of caution about the arXiv: it's not a journal, and in particular isn't peer-reviewed; it's just a repository for pre-prints. Anyone can upload anything to it. It's great for its intended purpose -- distribution of research that's not ready for the presses -- but it gives no assurances about its content.